Intercultural Communication and Translation News

    Posted by admin on February 15th, 2008

You don’t speak Mandarin and you lose your wallet and your way in Shanghai. Pantomime and Pictionary isn’t getting you anywhere. So, what do you do?

IBM says it can rescue you.

Last year, the tech titan launched MASTOR, a software tested and produced in Florida that allows real-time, two-way communication between two people speaking different languages.

All you do is speak into a PDA or laptop in English and the gadgets talk or write back the sentences in another language.

MASTOR – which stands for “multilingual automatic speech translator” – is currently being used by U.S. troops and workers in Iraq. Last March, IBM donated 1,000 devices and 10,000 MASTOR software copies to the U.S. Department of Defense.

The gadgets and codes valued at $45-million were tested and produced in IBM’s Boca Raton office. IBM, which has 1,200 employees in the Tampa Bay area, says the English-to-Arabic software is more than 90 percent accurate.

“It’s a very advanced piece of technology, and we haven’t sold it to anyone yet,” said Yuqing Gao, manager for speech recognition and understanding at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

Read more > IBM 

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